National Boycott Carriage Rides Day
(Why It Might Be the Day We Didn’t Know We Needed)
📰It begins with the clomp of hooves and the click of cell phone “shutters.” Then, somewhere near 59th Street in New York City, a tourist from Des Moines leans toward a horse named Elvis and whispers, “It’s just like in the movies.” Elvis does not respond. His soul left in 2017.
On National Boycott Carriage Rides Day, we call for a protest movement aimed not at New York City itself, but at a particular strain of visitor who believes that nothing says “cultural engagement” quite like subjecting a depressed Clydesdale to ten blocks of traffic and TikTok narration.
🚫We are also urge boycotting the idea that romance requires reins. That “authentic experience” means pretending the horse enjoys hauling fat-ass people who treat every lamppost as a selfie altar. That environmental awareness somehow stops at the hoof.
We are, finally, boycotting the corn-fed Midwestern mythology of New York—the one where the city is a giant set piece and the horses are living prop comedy. The kind of tourist whose idea of ethical travel is, “We tipped the horse.”
National Boycott Carriage Rides Day is a liturgical re-calibration calling us to evolve beyond the horse-drawn hangover of urban tourism.
So let us honor Elvis the horse. Let us retire the romance of reins. Let us ask: if your love story needs a suffering beast as a prop, is it really a love story at all?
